Perfecting Your Pitch

Introduction
Perfecting Your Pitch—the
Script’s the Thing

The West Point cadet and I were in a standoff. I wanted to learn about his studies of negotiations and the simulations he engaged in with stand-ins for village leaders in Afghanistan, while he, a Minneapolis native, couldn’t wait to hear about my negotiation of the recent Joe Mauer contract with the Minnesota Twins management. I had come to the military academy eager to speak to the cadets in the negotiation program and to learn about their experiences as cadets, their simulations of war zone interactions with village elders, wailing mothers, and NATO soldiers. But this cadet and many others wanted to hear about negotiating baseball contracts.

Standing in a grand library adorned with pictures and sculptures of renowned generals, I felt the pull of history and realized we were negotiating over who was going to swap his story first.

On the way up to West Point as I looked out the window at the majestic Hudson River during that pleasant train ride upstate from New York City, I was moved as I pondered the experiences and futures of these young people. I knew these men and women were training for potentially life-threatening situations in their negotiating class before moving on to their hard-core military science and math classes, and then subjecting themselves to intense physical training in the afternoons. I realized they would be keen to learn some nitty-gritty sports stories, in part as a relief from all their day-to-day stress.

So I relented and told the questioning cadet—along with a few anecdotes about Joe—about how I had developed a “script” for a critical contract session with Twins management. And then I began to make the connection that inspired this book. Despite the very different situations we were facing, I saw that both the cadet and I would be able to use scripting to ensure that preparation translated into desired results. Because in many of life’s battles, large and small, scripting can be an unparalleled tool.

We’ve all found ourselves in delicate situations—perhaps an important conversation with a spouse, customer, or boss—that seem firmly within our grasp but do not end well or spiral out of control. Days later, we might imagine the salient points we wish we had made if we had planned ahead. But the moment has passed.

I recently was consumed with the scripting for a client who, as controller of a major company, was negotiating with her manager for a long overdue pay raise. Like so many of us, she had no difficulty communicating requests on behalf of others. The trouble was that she struggled when making her own assertive “ask.”

In addition, I helped a ninety-two-year-old friend script a forceful counteroffer in a negotiation for the sale of his house. He had arranged to move into a retirement center and was selling his home, but was offended by a lowball offer. It was the only offer he had received for a fine house in a terrible market. However, he didn’t know how to effectively state the case for the value of the house.

But when my friend agreed to script his counteroffer, and the controller her pay raise request, using me as their devil’s advocate—essentially a coach, ally, and editor—the newfound clarity of their statements and confidence in their delivery dramatically improved their positions.

So, as I stood with the cadet, I smiled and he smiled knowingly, too.

“You know, you may find my negotiations of baseball contracts interesting, but, let me tell you, I find your simulated negotiations fascinating,” I said. “They may just save your lives, no?”

It seemed a fitting spot to tell him about scripting. Although it’s a tool that could be dismissed as “make-work,” scripting is useful in business, in retirement, in our marriages and families, in everyday commerce, and no doubt on the battlefield as well. It links a soldier’s high-stakes negotiations with the more mundane battles of regular citizens.

Preparation was the subject of a book I wrote in 2007. In these go-go, high-tech times, publishers had wondered: would anyone want to read about an old-school topic like methodical preparation?

Actually, yes. Dare to Prepare was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller, and I heard gratifying stories from dozens of people who were helped by the book.

But in my travels since the publication of Dare to Prepare, the need for this book became clearer. I realized the most critical and overlooked preparation tool was the one that most people resist. Scripting gets short shrift. People prepare well, but perfecting a pitch through scripting requires extra steps and effort at the end of the preparation process that is often neglected. If preparing is running a race, then scripting is crossing the finish line. For me, the mapping out of statements, contingencies, responses, and counters, using a devil’s advocate all the while, is the most exciting part of preparation. It can make me downright giddy. And I decided, with this book, to try to spread that enthusiasm.

I came to realize that without scripting, people were left with a gap in their defenses that an opposite party could sense and exploit. My clients and friends identified objectives, researched precedents, and imagined alternatives. But more often than not, if they were unfamiliar with scripting, they fell apart once they arrived at the proverbial table for the discussion. They found themselves “winging it” unnecessarily. On the other hand, when they did script, the added strategic reinforcements changed their outlook. Scripting is the best confidence booster I know.

During the middle of my presentation to the cadets, I caught the eye of my friend the Twins fan. Next to him, a female cadet was already raising her hand.

“How do we make scripting work for us in the context of our negotiations in battle zones?”

Bingo! She’d asked the million-dollar question that her colleague and I had been discussing earlier that day.

The young West Point cadets were likely to go off to war. They were going to be engaging in negotiations with tribal leaders and members of other militaries and irate citizens on foreign streets with stakes that make the commonplace negotiations in life and business seem trivial.

I wanted to show them how scripting techniques that are useful in the most rudimentary situations could be adapted to many of their own life-or-death situations. It’s the same process, I explained, whether rehearsing for a budgetary request, selling without sacrificing your price, buying a car, presenting the birds and the bees to our children, settling a debt, offering condolences, firing someone, suggesting a divorce, seeking a job, or marshaling support for an expanded medical research program. These are all make-or-break situations of a sort.

Now before I utter another word, I want to be clear that I am not advocating the end of extemporaneous expression. The vitality of every type of relationship, business or personal, lies in people’s ability to express feelings spontaneously from the heart. Ideally we can engage well with others frequently without the scripting process.

Yet the more I spoke to people about scripting, the more I realized how many applications it had. Managers can script before turning down a job applicant or trying to improve their lot with a bullying boss. Salespeople can script to deal with common buyer objections. Consumers can script to prepare themselves for returning a defective product or seeking an airline upgrade. Parents can script before nudging an adult child out of the house or taking the car keys away from an elderly loved one. It’s really about preparing for difficult conversations. It’s about navigating life.

For the cadets, using a scripting process, when possible, would elevate their success rate, and even their safety. And I admonished them that, as often happens in my examples, all the preparation in the world could fail them if they don’t embrace this final critical step before turning thoughts into speech.

That gap—between preparing and presenting, between thinking and speaking—is the Bermuda Triangle of human interaction. And scripting, I believe, is the best tool to bridge it.

My philosophy on scripting is inspired by Abigail Adams. Like many people, I was captivated with the HBO miniseries John Adams, based on David McCullough’s book. It was entertaining and educational, but, most of all, validating for me both as a professional and as a person. My favorite character, Abigail Adams, became my intellectual fixation, which led me to buy books and conduct research about her. Abigail Adams, as I told those West Point cadets, is my scripting hero. Not because she was a great scripter—that was her heroic husband—but because she was the quintessential devil’s advocate. Her husband wrote the scripts for his arguments to convince the Second Continental Congress that the disparate states should mold themselves into the United States of America. Then he tested his arguments on Abigail, who reviewed and revised them. When John Adams ultimately stood up in Congress, the words he delivered to achieve his objectives had been tested, parsed, and improved.

West Point, I knew, instills the convictions of teamwork and dependability. And the cadets in my audience immediately grasped that the young man or woman sitting next to them could be a latter-day Abigail Adams as a devil’s advocate. When I speak to audiences, I always ask them, “Who is your Abigail Adams?”

And judging by the murmurs of the cadets, that question really made them think—out loud!

This book, owing much to my exemplars, John and Abigail, and more to my own experiences as a lawyer, sports agent, corporate executive, mediator/negotiator, counselor, and teacher, explains the underlying principles of scripting for successful interactions and compiles a catalog of make-or-break work and life situations and stories that give them context. It then offers model scripts for dealing with each of them. I have selected these scripts based on three criteria: either I have experienced the particular challenge or scenario I am writing about; I have been regularly questioned about a similar situation in my teaching and travels; or I believe this is a situation that readers may face sooner or later.

Contents

Introduction Perfecting Your Pitch—the Script’s the Thing

Introduction
Perfecting Your Pitch—the
Script’s the Thing